Fed Pause A ‘Fond Memory’
Many eyes are on the Fed meeting this week. “The pause in the campaign to normalize short-term rates that Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke suggested in April is now a fond memory. One by one Fed officials have picked up the inflation-fighting gauntlet, reinforcing the bond market’s distaste for dovish talk and resistance to an end to the tightening cycle.”
“‘The more data you see the more it looks like a 5.50 percent (Federal Reserve funds rate) is going to happen at some point, with the housing data playing into the idea that the Fed will raise rates this week and again, in August’ said Scott Gewirtz, head of Treasurys trading in New York.”
“As the Federal Open Market Committee meets this week to increase interest rates for the 17th consecutive meeting, 6 in 10 investors say they think the Fed will increase interest rates too much too fast, leading to a recession, according to the June UBS/Gallup Index of Investor Optimism.”
“This belief may be one reason why investor optimism has continued to decline and now stands at its lowest point this year. Rising interest rates may also help explain why investors have such a dim view of the residential real estate market nationwide.”
“‘The Fed’s really walking a tightrope,’ said Scott Anderson, senior economist at Wells Fargo. ‘If they go higher, all bets are off, and there’s a big risk of a more severe housing downturn.’”
“‘Home sales are slowing, houses are sitting longer, and the number of properties on the market (is) at an all-time high,’ said Doug Duncan, chief economist of the Mortgage Bankers Association. ‘All of that is a recipe for a slowing market at a time when the Fed is raising interest rates and squeezing affordability.’”
The Treasury Department had this today. “U.S. mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pose risks to financial systems that could hit primary dealers, tighten credit and reduce liquidity in markets, a Treasury Department official said on Monday.”
“Emil Henry said the potential for spillover into financial markets from any crisis crisis at one of the government-sponsored mortgage finance enterprises (GSEs) is ‘nothing short of breathtaking.’”
“Henry said risks from GSEs could conceivably match the scale of the 1998 meltdown of the Long Term Capital Management hedge fund.”
“A deterioration in GSE financial conditions would almost certainly increase risk premiums and boost yields on GSE debt and mortgage-backed securities relative to Treasury yields and other benchmarks, he said. Primary dealers holding large positions in GSE debt or mortgage-backed securities could incur substantial losses, which would spill over into other markets, he said.”
A reader sent in this report from the UK:
‘Nearly one in 10 homeowners mistakenly think the Government would help them pay their mortgage if they lost their job, research showed today. Ian Noble, head of strategic partnerships at Lincoln Financial Group, said: ‘Millions of people are living with a false sense of security believing that the Government will bail them out if they cannot earn.’
‘That is not the case unfortunately. The Government is not going to pay for your mortgage if you lose your job, and assuming that it will places people in real danger as it suggests they have no other mortgage protection plan in place.’
What would a similar study in the US reveal?
You mean they won’t pay my mortgage? Why did I vote for the bums!
please donn’t wish for this
Come on guys/gals and other assorted individuals - HAVE A LAUGH - I unfortunately believe that some believe in the fairy godmother, the tooth fairy, the government knows what is best and the FED’s ability to control 100Trillion in derivatives. LMAO lighten up!
Tell me it ain’t true, YOU VOTED for these guys?????
“Tell me it ain’t true, YOU VOTED for these guys????? ”
I would bet at least 95% of the posters on these blogs consistantly vote Demopublican. How can you be so surprised?
Or maybe Republicrat
many in this country are a couple of paychecks aaway from bankruptcy.wont be long and we will find out how true this is.
Well, don’t they offer mortgage insurance that will pay if you lose your job? I suggest that if anybody is worried about job loss get insurance to protect yourself against hardships .
I think PMI only protects the lender
I didn’t know there was job loss insurance for the consumer. Other than unemployment.
Yes I think I was reading about job loss insurance . I don’t know very much about it . Maybe another poster might know more . But yes your right ,PMI insurance is for the lenders loss only .
They only offer it until you need it. As the market goes down they will pull it off the table as those in risk try and get it.
Credit cards offer a ‘payment protection plan.’ If you lose your job, you don’t have to make a payment on that card for, I think, six months.
The reason they don’t offer mortgage insurance that will pay if you lose your job is likely due to the difficulty of controlling the moral hazard problem that is inherent in this type of insurance arrangement. In plain English, if I knew my insurer would pay my mortgage if I lost my job, then it would be much more tempting to behave in a manner which got myself fired…
Oh, and there would also be an issue of adverse selection — the folks who were most worried about losing their jobs would be first in line to buy this type of insurance..
Job loss insurance that will pay your mortgage and other expenses for a fixed period of time is freely available to all.
It’s called … SAVINGS
Good point! And this form of insurance is far cheaper than most others, provided you figure out a good inflation hedge to insure your savings…
Hey! Where do I sign up to get this “savings” you allude to?
And can I put this “savings” thing on my credit card?
Several unions in the US offer strike/unemployment/disability mortgage payment assistance programs if you finance through their approved lender.
Well it proves that Americans in general are morons.
No kidding, we are like bait for bigger fish, somthing in the American attitude will not let us let our self go just the smallest bit and admit we are not “the smartest guys in the room” We need to get just a little humble here I think–
Who’s “we?” I am pretty much the smartest guy in most of the rooms I enter. That is, unless some of you fine people happen to be in the same room. Wife and I save just over half of our monthly GROSS. Rumor from the union has it that the board of ed. is looking to give around an 8.2% COLA in September, bumping my part up 15-16%. Wife gets an eval in December…
You know how our lifestyle is likely to change between now and January? Not a damn bit. We’ll just bump up the savings - have maybe one nice dinner out - and continue enjoying the good stuff in life (hint: ain’t got nothin’ to do with money).
Not bragging - I respect most of the folks here too much.
-We Rent
“Who’s “we?” I am pretty much the smartest guy in most of the rooms I enter. That is, unless some of you fine people happen to be in the same room. Wife and I save just over half of our monthly GROSS. ”
Good. I think many of us on this blog have come out of the woodwork and are truly good savers. It seems that way. I think many of us shed the Pollyanna attitude toward investments and have not only developed thick skin, but a severe (yet necessary) amount of skepticism. Americans have been (I hate to say) too optimistic. We have over 1 billion Muslims wanting to kill us and 10% of that 1 billion are working their behinds off trying to find ways to do it. 20% of the world’s oil comes from Saudi Arabia and the fields there have peaked. All the sweet crude is about gone and they have to inject water into the fields to bring up oil. $200 per barrel will be reality. And Americans fiddled away and bought McMansions, SUVs, and supersized themselves. Now even Toyota is making wider seats in its Highlanders to fit fatter Americans. Good grief!
true, but what did we teach them to be? Everything was supposed to be much better over there.
“those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad.”
There is insurance available if you loose your job Wlls Fargo used to market it heavily. It is stil available it will pay your mortgage for 6 mo’s or more. If I remember correctly it was about 50 bucks per mo. It has a big buy-in from corporate desk jockey’s
All over again… Wish I had not seen it the first time.
I advocated for a 50 basis-point hike in spring 2005. It might have shocked the market and kept us from being in the inflation mess we are in today. Nevertheless, I expect a 50 basis-point hike this week. BB has something up his sleeve and doing such an increase would certainly be noticed by everyone.
MHO is .25 this week 0.5 in August then a raise every time the ECB raises. Got to keep those foreign dollars buying our debt.
That’s gutsy. I thought .5 this week, then a pause, but there is good logic in following the ECB if we are to continue selling bonds, IMO.
no pause you flipper
Just saw this and felt important enough to post.
“The BIS worries that central bankers worldwide kept interest rates too low for too long, allowing asset prices to surge and global trade imbalances to reach unprecedented levels. These potential mistakes were compounded by central banks in Asia, particularly China, artificially preventing exchange rates from appreciating.
The immediate consequence for advanced economies is rising inflationary pressure now import prices are no longer falling. But the nagging longer term threat is the unwinding of the huge trade imbalances embodied in the US current account deficit and huge surpluses in China, Japan, Germany and oil exporters.”…
It said central bankers should take more account of global forces rather than domestic inflationary threats, take greater account of financial imbalances, including rising asset prices, and judge inflationary pressures over a much longer time horizon than the usual two to three years.
Financial Times
http://tinyurl.com/moa7z
The bond market does not believe you.
—————————————————————————–
BOND REPORT
Treasurys end lower for ninth consecutive session
Report shows unexpected strength in a market thought to be slowing
By Leslie Wines, MarketWatch
Last Update: 3:16 PM ET Jun 26, 2006
NEW YORK (MarketWatch) - Long-term Treasury prices fell for a ninth session in a row Monday, pushing the benchmark 10-year to close at a fresh 4-year high, after an unexpected surge in new home sales advanced the case for the Federal Reserve to keep lifting rates.
http://tinyurl.com/rl6k7
Long term bonds anyone?
Nobody talks about these pieces of long term junk certificates of confiscation. I think that the biggest unravelling will first happen in the long term bond market.
From the way bonds have been acting over the last 2 weeks, I can say it has already started.
Hearing policy wonks say “breathtaking” in the same sentence as finance, mortgage, spillover, financial markets, and government-sponsored enterprises make me blink. That’s a pretty powerful word.
A FNM or FRE meltdown would tighten money supply for mortgage lending beyond belief, further crashing values. I want to but long puts on these dogs, but they’re like 6 or 7 hundred bucks a contract for the longest I could find. Maybe it’s better to buy very low strike prices and more contracts, if things did really melt down.
I wonder what the probability of an Enron-like meltdown is.
Probably zero. Enron was eye-patch capitalism - the GSE’s are close, but have that all important get-out-of-jail card. So not Chernobyl, but Three-Mile Island.
What makes you think it’ll be front page news if the fed is monetizing the GSE’s debt? Seems to me this could be happening as we speak.
Exactly. We’d be the last to know.
there will be no smoking gun, just a small sigh–
FCBs are monetizing GSE debt. They switched from treasuries to GSE early this year.
Chernobyl killed people. TMI didn’t. Yet, how many nuke plants have been built in the US since TMI? None. Psychologically & politically, a serious problem at Fannie or Freddie would be much worse than Enron.
The probability of many ENRONS is more plausible. Enrons boosted by a couple of thermo-nuclear explosions in the debt market.
I think the probability of an Enron like meltdown is low because there are so many people with a vested interest to keep it going including the government(s). Then again I don’t know how they will keep it going either except print more money. If there is a melt down it will cause a lot more pain then Enron.
It’s all about the manner of the liquidity creation:
http://www.xanga.com/russwinter
Russ — the language at your site is at the outer limit of my technical knowledge. I grasp the graphs well enough, but re the following,
“It is very important to realize that since housing is hyperinflated relative to even a few years ago, one windfall transaction … today has much more bang for the buck than in 2001…”
What is a “windfall transaction” in that context? Is it something big, like a bundle of mortgages that doesn’t fail, or small individual profits like large single loans, or something else entirely?
Simply means that a house selling for 700K today (and 735K late last year) is still going to create more new credit (MEW), than the same house selling at 400k in 2001. In otherwords, because housing prices are so inflated, double digit sales slowdowns aren’t having much effect on the credit Bubble and consumer equity extraction.
Why wouldn’t lenders exercise greater precaution if prices were falling?
Lenders should exercise caution because the secondary market can change their mind on a dime and lenders can get caught holding paper they didn’t want to, (or will have to discount) .
In the meantime though, as long as the secondary market is buying, lenders will lend. Fortunately for lenders, secondary sales are/were occurring very frequently, so their exposure at any given time is less than what it would be with less frequent sales.
Once these secondary sales begin to fall through (or discounting begins), we will see things change very quickly in the lending criteria. Until then, it’s a drunken debt binge for all.
guess what, noone cares as long as they make money, the families are nothing much, collateral damage and all that—-oh my god
Makes the housing market sticky on the way down, creates Hyperinflation. Make basic feelings. Nice chart
Russ — Thx.
ha, the daytraders have moved on to homes and ignored fundamentals there.
Day traders learn from heyday
Doing their homework and hedging their bets, they are wiser now than they were in the 1990s
ha, stocks are still massively overvalued.
the dow/gold ratio has been cut in half. however, the two previous highs of 18(1929) and 28(1966) are close to today’s dow/gold ratio of 18.86
Oh, Lord, I’ve been a good girl. Please bring these idiots back. That was the easiest money anyone could ever make.
Now, now. Showing a wee bit of slip, aren’t we?
Good girls go to heaven. Bad girls go anywhere they want.
Yahoo finance has the poll of the day related to the strength of the housing market. Please be sure to vote. You will find it on the lower right side of this page:
http://finance.yahoo.com/
The report is misleading because it ignores the role of price reductions in spurring sales, and especially because (at least so far as I know) the price reductions they officially count do not reflect the large incentives builders are using to move inventory. The strength of housing cannot be very good if the increased sales are only due to price reductions so large that revenue is actually falling (my conjecture — but there is no way to check it without privately held data). If the increase in sales was actually bullish for builders, then why do they keep projecting lower profits?
Love the bit about the GSE risk maybe approaching LTCM’s. NOT. As in not even in the same universe. LTCM required a bailout of 4.5B. If the GSE’s melt, that’s gonna look like a picnic. Or if the hedge funds crack. @ end of 2005, 1.1 Trillion in hedge funds. I look at these numbers and I see an overall systemic risk that is frightening.
When LTCM cracked there were 7 Trillion in Derivatives, now there are over 100 Trillion in derivatives in the US. Moscow times reported last week world wide derivatives are 820 trillion. That might hurt a little.
LTCM was the test case which showed the hedges that they could get bailouts provided they were too big to fail. Not surprisingly, we have lots more hedges posing massive systemic risk now than back when LTCM was bailed out.
LTCM got bailed out by the banks, with greenspan just bringing them together.
Why is this important to the case at hand — that hedge funds have implicit insurance against blowups, provided they are too big to fail?
We were forced to “lend”! It was essentially “Lend or tighter regulations.”
They didn’t bail out LTCM. Its losses were huge. Rather, they organized an orderly liquidation, reducing the losses (and gains — this was a zero-sum game) of LTCM’s counterparties and lenders.
From the update:
‘The Fed’s really walking a tightrope,’ said Scott Anderson, senior economist at Wells Fargo. ‘If they go higher, all bets are off, and there’s a big risk of a more severe housing downturn.’
‘Home sales are slowing, houses are sitting longer, and the number of properties on the market (is) at an all-time high,’ said Doug Duncan, chief economist of the Mortgage Bankers Association. ‘All of that is a recipe for a slowing market at a time when the Fed is raising interest rates and squeezing affordability.’
‘If they go higher, all bets are off, and there’s a big risk of a more severe housing downturn.’
He described the abyss to one side of the tightrope. To the other side is the scenario where the Fed does not tighten enough, and long-term bond yields spike up to price in an inflation premium (like they have for nine days straight now), as the bond market remains unconvinced the Fed has sufficient knee strength to prevent inflation from running away from them. That would result in much higher long-term fixed-rate mortgage interest levels (not that anyone uses those much any more).
It is hard to envision a Fed scenario going forward which is favorable for sustaining the housing bubble.
I have always said that it won’t be unemployment that will bring the housing cash cow down…. it will be the collapse of the GSE’s.
And don’t forget, the gorilla on the sofa is the dollar. And sign of hesitation and the dollar gets crushed as central banks around the world tighten. Dollar protection is No1 since it protects the dollar’s position & also curbs inflation.
It’s 50bpts and pause or 25bpts and watch & wait. Markets might respond better to 50?
There’s that old bass-ackward comment again. That people think the Fed and their policies on interest rates are the ’cause’ of a squeeze in affordibility is nuts. It’s the prices, guys, the prices! I’ve borrowed money from 5% to 16%, and those rates have always moved. But my purchase price has never changed.
All I know is the most dim-witted person I know just called me to tell me that there is a housing bubble and prices are going down .
If this person knows about it , everybody knows about it .
Well dammit would somebody tell the people who are bidding up the housing stocks!
“short covering”?
Well, then tell *them*!
Remember, it’s contracts signed, not closures, that are reported.
Cancellation rates are still climbing.
Inventories of unsold homes up 31% YOY.
The great slowdown is just beginning.
Finally!!
“Year to year home sales fall in New York for May”
http://albany.bizjournals.com/albany/stories/2006/06/26/daily4.html
Oh look, another yoy decline!
“Bay State Single-Family and Condo Sales Fall Again in May, the Warren Group Reports”
http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20060626005101&newsLang=en
This is important because the Warren group takes their numbers from the register of deeds office. This includes FSBO as well as MLS sales.
Good interview in the second part of this article re: why the bubble has not popped even faster: (hint: rate increases are priced in credit creation equation)
http://www.safehaven.com/article-5429.htm
Ya know, this is what’s wrong with today’s housing scenario in the first place. To begin with, and GET this one, please, the FED ONLY sets SHORT term interest rates.
Again, the FED has NO CONTROL over long term interest rates. NONE. Long term rates are determined PURELY on the free market.
Therefore, the FED has no control over anyone buying a house with a traditional 15 or 30 year mortgage. NONE, whatsoever. ZIP. ZILCH. NADA.
Got that?
Oh, and the above is in reponse to this quote from the article:
““‘Home sales are slowing, houses are sitting longer, and the number of properties on the market (is) at an all-time high,’ said Doug Duncan, chief economist of the Mortgage Bankers Association. ‘All of that is a recipe for a slowing market at a time when the Fed is raising interest rates and squeezing affordability.’”
What if the feds offer higher yeilds on (long term) bonds, making it more palatable for investors who would opt for that over mortgage papers?
Dont know for sure.. just asking…
Agree 100%.
Except no one is buying with a 15 or 30 year mortgage, because they can’t afford the house with that kind of mortgage at current prices. The higher short term rates are pushed, the more pain there will be when all the ARMs adjust.
“Again, the FED has NO CONTROL over long term interest rates. NONE. Long term rates are determined PURELY on the free market.”
How does the Fed control short term interest rates? According to my money & banking professor, they raise rates by conducting “open market operations”, which amount to selling long-term Treasury bonds, thereby taking liquid money (the kind denominated in Federal reserve notes, savings acount balances, and checking account balances) out of circulation by the amount of the sales times a multiplier which takes into consideration lending reserve requirements. Conversely, when the Fed purchases bonds, money is put into circulation in exchange for the bonds, which go into the Fed’s electronic vault.
So an open market operation is basically a trade of money now (liquid money / cash) for money later (treasury bonds). Given that it is used to purchase bonds, please explain why this manna (money) from heaven has no effect on the price thereof, which is the long-term interest rate?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manna
I remember years ago, when I had way too many credit cards, that almost every card offered a “balance protection plan” or some similarly-named product that would make your (probably minimum) credit card payments if you lost your job. I think they also had a time limit. I analyzed them and decided that they weren’t really a good deal. They charged you X% of your outstanding balance each month. I no longer get those offers.
This thread has caused me to wonder if the mass-utilization of HELOCs in recent years rendered these products unmarketable on a large scale?
OT, but “hats off” to Warren Buffet for being the antithesis of the greedy specuvestors who have, at least temporarily, poisened the US housing market.